During the past years companies world wide have struggled with creating content management systems (CMS) for web sites. The purpose of a content management system is to allow the content managers (editors) to update the content of a web site as easily as possible. Basically, a content manager is an editor on which the structure and elements of a web site is imposed. So far CMS have been no more than simple editors based around simple observations of the structure of a web site.
CMS also try to solve a second task, namely that of being able to quickly build a new web site. Based on the observations of common web site structures, CMS suppliers attempt to give the user a gallery of web-templates for common web site designs. This has caused a multitude of different CMS because none of the existing approaches has captured the representation of the generic structure of web sites within a single CMS. Whenever one finds a suitable structure there is always an exception to the rules when using the system for a new customer. Present CMS are therefore typically designed for special purpose web sites such as for example info sites, eCommerce or Portals. These systems thus limit the functionality to what a typical web site of a certain type would need/require. For example, the user might need to put the content into a template as shown in FIG. 1.
In the sample template of FIG. 1 the user could typically choose to put the menu in Area2, some design in Area1, and the textual content in Area3. Obviously, basing a web site on fixed templates, or a template gallery, will always lead to shortcomings. Good examples of such CMS include the CMS made by Oracle.